Artist Member
The Raven, title page
Selected Poems of William Morris
Wedding Book
Maryanne Grebenstein
www.theabbeystudio.com
www.turninthepath.com
Facebook: theabbeystudioUS
Instagram: @theabbeystudio
BIO 
Maryanne Grebenstein is a professional calligrapher & book artist, and the owner of The Abbey Studio in Marblehead, MA. She creates unique books that are completely hand-lettered, hand-decorated, and hand-bound. Her one-of-a-kind books are held in collections in the rare books departments of the Philadelphia Free Library, Texas A&M University, and St. Anselm College, as well as private collections. She teaches workshops in calligraphy, manuscript design, manuscript gilding, and layout in her Marblehead studio/shop. She is a former teacher at North Bennet Street School, and a former Adjunct Professor at Massachusetts College of Art. She is the author of Calligraphy: A Course in Hand Lettering and Calligraphy Bible, both published by Watson-Guptill.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My love affair with letters and the alphabet (which began during childhood) naturally led me to calligraphy and books. The power of the written word has an intriguing history, beginning with a few tribe-local symbols that were standardized, by the Roman Emperor Trajan at about the year 100, into a recognizable set of marks, that are still used as what we today would call the Roman alphabet.
Calligraphy as an art form has a distinct privilege: The ability to transform language – conversation, emotion, knowledge, imagination – from the intangible to the physical. To convey a spoken message in the form of a visual, tactile artifact is something uniquely human. A transformation that has the potential to transcend time, proven by historical items such as Victorian locked letters and the Archimedes palimpsest.
Books, and in particular books created by hand, have the inherent potential to provide a medium for these expressions of thought that is at once beautiful, informative, and evocative, with the added elements of protection and discretion (one must open it to fully enjoy it) while providing one of the most humanly pleasant experiences of all: they can be held in your hand.
Creating my hand-lettered, handmade, one-of-a-kind books is the culmination of decades of practice and study, bridging centuries of history to the present day.